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What just happened? Intel has released a bewildering image of a massive socket-based graphics processor. No one had any idea what it was until Intel’s Raja Koduri called him “everyone’s father.” That is an internal name for a specific Xe GPU. Intel Xe is an upcoming GPU series spanning every market you can imagine.
This graphics processor is strange. As you can see in the image, from the outside it looks more like a CPU than a GPU. It sits on a socket with almost three thousand pins. It has an integrated heat diffuser.
Inside, it is unlike anything we’ve seen before. Using AA battery for scale, the chip is about 4000mm2. If the active area is half that size, it is three times the size of an RTX 2080 Ti. It has “tens of billions” of transistors, while the RTX 2080 Ti has just under twenty billion.
But what kind of GPU is it? At the moment, this processor circumvents the classification as information Intel has provided It is contradictory. Koduri previously He said the “father of all” is a Xe HP (high performance) product. Later he would also mention This chip is compatible with BF16, a highly specialized AI acceleration calculation format. BF16 is a confirmed and exclusive feature of Xe HPC (High Performance Computing). So this chip could be a Xe HPC product …
This was called the “baap of all” by our team … The “Baahubali of all” is also baking. Hopefully the wait is shorter than @ssrajamouli impersonate @BaahubaliMovie 🙂 https://t.co/psWsIL5rnp
– Raja Koduri (@Rajaontheedge) May 2, 2020
The difference between the two is substantial. Xe HP is game and workstation oriented. Leaks set the main counts between 1024 and 4096. Xe HPC is for servers and is optimized for AI and scientific work. The only HPC product under development is called the Ponte Vecchio, it is said to have 1024 cores, but it is by far the most powerful accelerator Intel is developing due to its complex memory subsystem and the variety of cores and operations it supports. You can read more about this in our in-depth breakdown on Xe.
While neither HP nor HPC can be definitively ruled out, the nature of the latter seems more suited to the mysterious new processor. It would be rather strange for a game processor / workstation to be prototyped in a socket-based format, whereas Ponte Vecchio has already been represented in what could be a socket
Furthermore, from the first schematics and introductions, Ponte Vecchio can be expected to be unprecedented due to the inclusion of the large footprint RAMBO cache and built-in HBM2 (or HBM2E). There is no reason to expect an HP product to be this great.
Regardless of what exactly this GPU is, the “father of all” will surely have the mother of all price tags, so you’d better start saving. Xe HP will launch sometime this year and Ponte Vecchio will be ready in late 2021.
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